Redefining Democracy’s UX: How Indigov is Modernizing Government Tech

The following interview is a conversation we had with Alex Kouts, CEO and Co-Founder of Indigov, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $38 Million Raised to Transform How Elected Officials Manage and Engage with Their Constituents

Alex Kouts
Hey, thanks for having me, Brett. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start the quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Alex Kouts
Sure, yeah. So, hello everybody. My name is Alex. I have been basically spending my entire career building and scaling tech startups. I started off in kind of a product and design side of things. I was a UX designer. I was a product manager at one point, among a bunch of other things, and started building and scaling other people’s companies, and founded companies of my own. About ten years or so ago, I got super interested in civic stuff, which we’ll talk about in a minute, which kind of led me to indica. But I’ve also advised a bunch of companies in the past, both big companies and small companies. But my heart really lies with doing cause focused work in startups, where there’s a very and this is a very complex topic, but viable business model to sustain the good that the company creates, which is what Indigov is. 

Alex Kouts
That’s always been my path. 

Brett
Amazing. And is there a specific notable company that you’ve worked with or you’ve built that our listeners may know? 

Alex Kouts
Well, Indigov is the most notable, of course, but there’s a bunch that they may have heard of in the past. One was a company if you bought a computer anytime between the time of the mid 90s all the way to the early 2000s, it probably came preloaded with a weather application called WeatherBug, which is a subsidiary, Earth Networks, and so that had a couple of hundred million downloads of applications that company had done. So that one I’ve done a civic tech company with Sean Parker and a bunch of really smart talent folks in the Bay Area that was meant to be a political social graph called Brigade in the Bay Area. That one got around quite a bit, but Indigov was by far and above my cry. Enjoy. It the crown jewel. 

Brett
Nice. Amazing. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder and CEO. Is there a specific CEO that you admire the most? And if so, who is it, and what do you admire about them? 

Alex Kouts
It’s a really interesting question, Candidly. I never really had role models, which is a weird thing, other than my parents, who absolutely are my role models, but not because that I think I’m too good for role models or anything like that. But I think in my life, in my founder journey, I’ve always kind of felt very alone in my path, which sounds like kind of a lonely, sad thing, but it isn’t. It’s just the kind of way that I look at it. And I always kind of felt that a lot of folks, not everybody, but a lot of folks over indexed for other people’s experiences and kind of grasp those experience on their lives and their companies in a way that doesn’t always help them as much as I think they’d like them to. And so I would say generally, no. There are a bunch of people that I really respect and that have done amazing things in companies. 

Alex Kouts
I think I’m a big fan of design focused founders who really deeply understand a core problem and then design a solution for it. Empathy first. I think there’s a lot of my friends who founded companies to do that kind of thing. There’s folks that are involved with Indigov, like one of our lead investors. Board member Bradley Tusk is a really interesting guy. I respect him a ton. And I would say this if he was sitting in the room, he’s dedicated enormous amount of his own fortune and time to solving problems that he thinks are important without a dramatic expectation of return for a lot of it, which I think is incredibly virtuous. So anybody who’s sacrificing for something that they believe in is something that I look up to, and there’s a ton of people in my life that do. 

Brett
That amazing. I just finished reading the book from Bradley Tusk called The Fixer. Do you ever read that? 

Alex Kouts
Oh, yeah. That’s a great book, man. There’s a lot of really good knowledge in there. He knows his stuff. 

Brett
Yeah, he’s fascinated. The work that he did with Uber, it was fun reading about it years ago. I had experienced some of that stuff. So it’s really a fascinating book to hear behind the scenes what was really happening. 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, I mean, in that book, and I definitely recommend people pick it up if it’s a topic that interests them. But he speaks very frankly. And having known Bradley really well and become friends with Bradley, I can tell you he talks like he writes in person. Super frank, super direct. He probably uses slightly more explanators in person than I remember being a book. But yeah, that’s a great one. 

Brett
And outside of The Fixer, is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? This can be a business book or just a personal book that’s influenced how you view the world. 

Alex Kouts
I don’t really read business books. I try and stay away from them as a general rule, and that’s a complex topic for another time. But there are lots of books that are non business related, have been really impactful to me. But for the most part, I think most books that I’ve read, even really good books, I kind of pick one or two things to walk away with and those kind of stick with me and I ruminate over those. A couple of examples. There’s one book we call them an Astronaut guide to Life on Earth by the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. There was one part of that book that I love that he said that I think about constantly about how astronauts are taught to work. The problem in NASA speak, which is basically AI transcription for, in his words, descending one decision tree after another methodically, looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. 

Alex Kouts
I love that idea that when there’s a problem that comes up, it’s not an emotional response or a visceral response that we want. We want to just think about the logic of it, go down in SIGM tree, figure it out until we run out of time, which I really thought was great. Another one that I love, there’s a married couple, Will and Ariel Durant were both individually very fascinating people, but wrote an unbelievable amount of history historical reviews of pretty much every topic you could imagine. Very, very prolific pillow surprise winners, or at least Will was. I’m not sure about Ariel, but really fantastic. And anything they wrote, I love. There’s one book in particular called Lessons of History that basically runs through everything that they’ve learned in their entire 50 plus year career of doing historical analysis of humanity. And there’s a lot of really interesting things in there. 

Alex Kouts
One other one that I would recommend is The Next 100 Years, I believe is the name of the book, which kind of talks about macro level trends that determine where society goes over time and how countries and populations evolve. And one thing that was fascinating about that is it really prompted me to zoom out a little bit and look at how civilizations progress through these macro trends that can’t really be changed easily through things like politics. And so as an example, population density and aging changes over a country will actually determine much more of its future and what it doesn’t do, what it’s capable of or what it isn’t, than a bill that is released or a particular social movement. So that book was really interesting, too. The only business book I recommend is one called Play Bigger, which I read probably about five or six years ago now, maybe more. 

Alex Kouts
But it made an impression on me. It was about category definition and how companies kind of create categories and become category kings or queens coming out of that. And that was a really fascinating one. 

Brett Stapper
Yeah, I love Play Bigger, and we’re big into category design and category creation. So good to hear you’ve read that book. I have to dig a bit deeper into the first thing you said there though, that you don’t read business books, so we don’t have to spend too much time on that. But I’d love to understand why is it that you don’t read business books? 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, so I feel like I sound like a very hard and contrarian a lot of these questions, but I don’t think that I am one. But really, the thing is for those of you who your audience, who’ve started companies before or built things from scratch, and this is true in a lot of walks of life, and maybe it’s true for parenting as well. I don’t have kids yet, I hope to one day. But I think when we look at the advice of others or we over index on the advice of others or their experiences, we try and graph those experiences onto our life, hoping that we can enact what they did kind of verbatim. And I think in many cases that doesn’t work because life has to be lived. We have to figure out things on our own to some degree. And I do believe we are alone with the problem at the end of the day in many ways. 

Alex Kouts
But I think the other one is that when we read business books, we in many cases rob ourselves of our ability to really think through problems on our own and first order reasons from the ground up. The data that I’m ingesting, how do I feel about that? What does that mean to me? And then try and figure out answer to it. And so I’ve always just been petrified. One of my greatest fears in life is not having kind of creative control over my own existence, kind of being other people, or kind of taking someone else’s path as opposed to figuring out my own. So I think it’s probably an intense rebelliousness. So I don’t necessarily recommend that for other people. I do think it is genuinely useful to read business books that can give you ideas or things to think about that may not come naturally to you, but I have a healthy dose of skepticism for them. 

Brett
That’s fascinating. I like the contrarian view there. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive into what you’re actually building here. So can you talk us through the origin story behind the company? 

Alex Kouts
Sure. Yeah. So about twelve years ago or so, I very much fell out of love with the Bay Area. I kind of poked my head up and I was in San Francisco at the time, kind of building and again scaling companies, and I poked my head up and looked around and what I realized was that the Bay Area had become, or maybe always was the world Olympics of value creation rationalization. There were all these companies that acted like they were doing something monumentally beneficial for humanity. But in reality, technology is not a force for good. It isn’t a force for bad either. It’s just an engine of convenience to accelerate. That’s all that it does. And so I have a real problem with people who build technology for technology’s sake. It’s one of the reasons I’ve had such issues with the AR VR world, with crypto and blockchain and all these things, because you get people that are overly excited about technology, and then it becomes a solution in search of a problem mentality. 

Alex Kouts
Right? I have this thing, I really want to figure out a way to use it. What could I possibly use it on? That’s fundamentally a broken way to look at starting companies and technological businesses. The idea with technology is that you have to really deeply understand a problem that matters to you personally. Become the world’s leading expert on that problem. Verify that there are enough people that have that problem and that they can’t solve it themselves and that they’re willing to pay for that solution and that the market is big enough to sustain a business, especially if you’re doing a venture funded company, you got to make sure that there’s enough of a market to justify 100 million arr business and above. And so that’s not what I saw in the Bay Area. I saw exactly the opposite. Again, the solution in search of a problem. 

Alex Kouts
And so I saw these companies doing, my employees have heard me say a thousand times, olympic level contortions to rationalize what they are doing to make it seem as though they’re creating societal value. And so, not to pick on Zynga, but there were people at Zynga at the time, before its liquidity event, that were like, we’re doing something that matters, we’re making people’s lives better. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that for 90% of companies that say that maybe a higher percentage. And so that really freaked me out and gave me a bit of an existential crisis where I went camping, actually, with the CFO of Indigov, now a good friend of mine, John, I’ve known for a very long time, and I thought about it in the woods while were going camping and had this crisis. It was like, well, shoot, how do I take all the things that I’ve learned, UX design, product stuff, sales, business development, and apply it to a problem that is meaningful to me, that I think can actually help humanity in some way? 

Alex Kouts
And so what I came down to was that there were only two things that humanity had invented outside of a profit motive to the betterment of society at scale. One was religion. And I wasn’t going to become a priest, at least not at this point in my life. And the second was government. And so I had never really been interested in government before. I don’t watch the news, I’m not particularly interested in politics, but I am intensely interested in democracy what it is supposed to do and what it stands for. I think a lot of people and this is a common trope or something that Gen Z and millennials like to say that democracy is the least worst system of government in the world, I think that’s short sighted. I actually think it’s incredible. It is an enormous societal achievement to create democratic governmental rule as opposed to autocracies or oligarchies or other things. 

Alex Kouts
And we do have a democracy in this country, and it is a very precious and fragile thing, and it requires every generation to invest in it. Otherwise we are no more than one generation away from losing it. And so I looked at that problem, and I was like, okay, well, how can technology, knowing that it is not a force for good, knowing that it is just an engine of convenience, how can technology help rebuild the user experience of government? And I started with user experience because I was a user experience designer, and I was a citizen and an immigrant to this country. My family comes from Greece, and I’m intensely patriotic. This country has given my family unbelievable things. I love this country. I believe in what it stands for, truly at a very deep, visceral level. And so I started thinking about that. So I started building civic engagement applications to rebuild the experience of democracy. 

Alex Kouts
So it sucks to read a bill. I tried to read the health care bill Obamacare at the time, and it was 3500 pages of pork and legal speak and all these things, and it was completely unintelligible to the average citizen. And so I was like, all right, well, how do we make that easier? How do we make it accessible to most people? So I designed interfaces to do that, to help people read bills and reach out to electives. And I founded a company in that space, and another company. And through companies I founded and worked at and experiences I designed, I’d sent roughly 75 or 80 million messages to elected representatives through these apps. But the problem is the users that would do this through my apps would never get a response. And so that really p***** me off. And so I started flying from San Francisco back to DC and just randomly walking into congressional offices, which was bizarre at the time and was shocking to me that’s even possible, by the way, that they let you do that, but they’re the people’s buildings, and that’s okay. 

Alex Kouts
And so I started walking in and talking to staffers, like, hey, so what do you guys do here? What happens when a message comes in? What happens? And they were using these very old legacy systems that looked nothing like the types of tools that private market companies would have to manage a similar level of communication. And so I went on this journey, this quest to redesign those systems and build a true constituent management system so that now, when a constituent reaches out to them, no matter what channel it comes in from social media, phone calls, emails, web forms, refer to another office, it gets triaged organized. Then the office can write meaningful response to that. So the constituents getting a personal response from a human that goes back to them. And we are able now to do that again. Across 44 or so states, almost 200 million Americans, hundreds of millions of messages and data points and things on a yearly basis, we are increasing the responsiveness of government, making people have a better response. 

Alex Kouts
And so we started off in Congress. We sold to them. They were our first launch customer, and then it was state and local governments and we expanded across the US. And so to put a bow on it, the mission of the company, the reason that we founded it, is because we believe in democracy. We believe that it needs help and we believe that technology can help in specific ways that improve outcomes for constituents. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. So it’s been a long, very painful journey. There’s a lot of subtext that I edited out for that for just time’s sake. But at some point I will give the most depressing ted talk you’ve ever heard about government tech transformation. It is a very difficult process, put it that way. 

Brett
And if we’re just looking at Congress, for example, just to have an idea of the scale of the messages they receive, how many is the average Congressman getting per month? Is it 100? Is it 100,000? I wouldn’t even know where to begin there with what a number would be. 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, it’s interesting. It varies heavily based on level of government, if it’s a leadership office, so on and so forth. So a leadership office like the speaker of the House could be getting over 100,000 messages a week between phone calls, faxes, emails, all kinds of things. Just an unbelievable number. The average member of Congress probably gets somewhere between three and 5000 messages a week, but then you have to actually sit down and they have average constituent sizes of around six to 800,000 people. And so they’re getting about 3000 a week from that group. But interestingly enough, 80% to 90% of their incoming message volume is not actually coming from constituents directly. It’s coming through legacy organizations who are paid to wallpaper offices with thousands of identical messages to affect legislative outcomes. And if I was a constituent, I knew that really p***** me off. I’m like, well you guys should be responding to me like I’m your constituent, not a nonprofit or a lobbying firm or something like that. 

Alex Kouts
But we help them manage that glut of automated stuff as well. Got it. 

Brett
And when you say messages, does that count like someone just tweeting at a congressman as well? Or are those like direct messages, direct emails, things like that? 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, so that number is primarily emails and web form messages, and then automated messages through an API that Congress is available, but that also includes social media, tweets, Facebook messages, Instagram messages. I don’t think most members of Congress are or should be on Tinder. But if that was an avenue and people want to reach out through that, they should have everything available to them. 

Brett

And what percentage of those typically get a response? And what type of engagement have you seen change as a result of using your platform? Are there any numbers you can share there? 

Alex Kouts
Sure, yeah. So we’ve run tests with members of Congress before Indigov was in existence, and we sent the same message to every member of Congress. We’ve done this a couple of times to gauge average constituent response times to see, okay, we send in a middle of the road message. You should have a response to this. Maybe it’s about COVID or some dominant topic from a validated address in someone’s district. What is the response time? Before us? What we saw was only one third of Congress responded at all within 130 days, one third of congressional officers. And of the ones that did, the average constituent response time was 83.8 days. That’s insane. Imagine reaching out toyota or Dyson vacuum cleaners go, oh, my vacuum cleaner exploded, and I need some help here. And you get a response four or five months later or not at all. 

Alex Kouts
That is a democracy that isn’t listening, doesn’t care about me, isn’t engaged with me. And so, of course, I’m going to walk away with an incredibly low approval rating of Congress if I have an experience like that. And if thousands of people are having those with each individual office a week, imagine what that does for national confidence in the organization. And so in our platform, people get a 100% response rate. So everybody gets a response by design, and they get it on average, between eight and 10 hours after they send it. And so if people are using Indigov, the response is very quick and it’s definite. We can then even send automated follow up messages to say, hey, did we help you? Did we answer your question? And we can filter information back up to the representative to say, hey, you have a six out of ten approval rating with constituents based on your responses, or an eight out of ten. 

Alex Kouts
And we give them numbers that they can optimize against with their staff. Fascinating. 

Brett
And when you were starting the company, did you get a lot of pushback from friends and investors trying to say, maybe go to a space where there’s more money at face value? Did you have that type of pushback that you had to overcome? 

Alex Kouts
Oh, yeah. I wish I could use the word as gentle as pushback. I think it was worse than that. So I had venture funds and individual investors, GPS At funds who had made a lot of money with me in the past and had given me the kind of second time founder pledge of like, hey, blank check, come back to me, whatever, you got an idea, we’d love to work with you again, we’ll figure it out. And so I went back to all those people and there were several when I started Indigov and everybody said, we love you. Anything but government. We don’t know anything about government. We can’t invest in government, we can’t do it now. This is before pounds here and before the numerous unicorn companies are in the GovTech space that exist now. But at the time it was really greenfield stuff, blue sky stuff for venture funds. 

Alex Kouts
So venture capital funds generally not all, but generally are pack hunters. I think the analysis or metaphor analogy I’ve heard in the past, it’s like they’re like penguins standing on the edge of an iceberg waiting for another penguin to jump in to see if they get eaten by a seal or a shark or something. And if one penguin jumps in, they’re fine and the other will jump in. And so that was very much the case with GovTech. And so to your point about that book earlier, we mentioned play bigger category definition. It is a uniquely difficult challenge to raise venture capital for a category defining company. Venture capitalists will say that they love that, but the truth is it’s really hard to evaluate risk premiums if they don’t have a proxy of other people’s participation. And so, yeah, it was extremely difficult at the beginning, although I’ll say were revenue generating and had significant traction and growth before we raised any money for the company, which made that pitch a lot easier. 

Alex Kouts
We found some kind of visionary investors at the beginning of the company that really helped us validate the market to other people and things snowballed after that. But figuring out angle approach at the beginning was, to put it mildly, stressful. 

Brett Stapper
I can imagine. And are you seeing that change now? I know it’s a bit of a different space, but I’ve been following and Drill a lot and Josh Wolf at Lux Capital who’s betting big on defense tech and they’re all trying to really push hard for Silicon Valley and the tech world to be open to working with defense, open to working with government. And it sounds like it’s at least making some progress. Are you seeing that or is it still the same as it was back in, say, 2018? 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, we are. I mean, we get a lot of inbound interest on venture funds every day and I can afford them all to my CFO. He does the first round of kind of evaluation, but we have a lot of blue chip funds who are reaching out to us that we’d never talked to before. Just saying, hey, we’re looking for spaces that are not absolutely on fire. Because if you look, it’s really hard to get excited about ecom or media or automation or blockchain or crypto or any of the things that people were getting really excited about a couple of years ago. Government, and our market in particular is a subset of government. The DoD to some degree as well, is one of the only markets I can imagine that’s completely insulated from market and geopolitical instability. When there are economic recessions or there’s significant turmoil in labor markets or capital markets, government spends more. 

Alex Kouts
And that’s true with our customers. And so we’ve posted really healthy triple digit growth every single year of this company. And it was really started in essence, we started scaling during COVID when every other company was dying. And so we throw that proof point out to investors and they go, oh okay, that’s kind of incredible. And so we’re doing a lot of informational conversations. I think the next time that we open up a fundraise, we’ll probably get preempted. And I will say as well, just given our growth and traction, were preempted in all of our fundraising rounds before we actually went out to raise around. And so were always kind of price takers, or to some degree price makers, I guess, but we’ve been very fortunate to put it that way. 

Brett
And because of the space you’re in, do you have to be careful who you allow to invest and to be part of the cap table? That’s something I was just reading in an article in the Information with Josh Wolf where he was saying that he needs to be very careful in who invests in his fund. Because if he’s investing in defense tech, if it traces back to Saudi Arabia, then it can potentially create some conflicts there that he has to try to avoid. So do you have to manage something similar where you have to be very careful in who the investors are and who their LPs are? 

Alex Kouts
Oh yeah, big time. If ever we get serious or we receive a term sheet that we’re serious about, considering any of the rounds that we’ve done, we do a full analysis of all the LPs and ask for documentation for everybody. And part of that comes from and we’re very closely connected to the defense world in the sense that our first money into Indigov was a bunch of the founders of Palantir and they’ve been an amazing resource for us. I focused on them and sought them out because of their experience in GovTech. And we had a couple of questionable funds that were really enthusiastic and great valuations, really favorable terms, all those things in a couple of rounds. And I kind of presented them to some of the Palantir crew and was like, hey listen, these folks take some non US money. This fund takes some Hong Kong money. 

Alex Kouts
Not mainly in China, but Hong Kong. How do we feel about that? And in every situation where it was anyone outside the US. Basically or anyone from an unfriendly country, put it that way. The PalaceR Group was like, yeah, we never would have taken money from any of these folks who would have absolutely cut that off of the head. And so we’ve been really disciplined about it. But you got to due diligence and you have to ask a lot of questions that companies typically don’t ask with venture funds. And I’ll say too, when taking money from an unfriendly country can kill your business, you have to have a level of diligence with investors that is not normal for like a run of the mill consumer product company or a hardware company or something like that. So yeah, it was a big consideration for us. Makes a lot of sense. 

Brett
And can you talk to me about the sales process of selling to Congress? What does that procurement process look like? How does that sale begin? Who’s involved in the decision making? What’s that process look like? Because I think most of our listeners are in enterprise B, two B tech. So they’ll have an understanding there, but I would guess not many of them have sold into Congress. So if you can enlighten us there. 

Alex Kouts
That would be great. Yeah, well, Congress is a small market so I don’t know if that is super useful to a lot of your listeners in the sense that they have a huge amount of money. The most they spend on any individual tech product is what we do. There’s not a whole lot of market for other folks. But I’ll kind of zoom out to a high level some thematic things that we’ve seen that were big. So if you’re ever doing extremely large bureaucratic sales, whether to a government agency or let’s say a Fortune Ten company or Fortune 100 company or something like that, my opinion, you have to look at the sales process as both an exercise in networking but also derisking. And so with Congress and with elected representatives and large companies, I’ve been doing enterprise staff for a large part of my career. 

Alex Kouts
You always go top down if you can. It’s really hard to go top down. You have to build the relationships and the capital in order to be able to access those people at angle of approach that’s actually going to create a productive conversation. So get the right people on your cap table, get the right advisors in, pick the right law firm, get the right employees, all those things to kind of set that up. But you kind of go top down if you sell the person in government in particular at the top, then everybody else afterwards and kind of the lower levels takes it very seriously and evaluates in a much different way than if you go bottom up. I’ve seen a lot of GovTech companies fail when they go bottom up, but again, much easier said than done. Aside from that, on the de risking side, we focused and I focused really heavily with Congress on creating zones of innovation, okay? 

Alex Kouts
Because were the first cloud vendor that Congress had ever approved for anything like what we do, which is gigantic leap for them from a security posture perspective. So we’re like, okay, well, we don’t want to do a full organizational rollout, but we want to do zones of innovation or lighthouse offices that will adopt this technology inside of the legislature and they will sign a risk assessment or risk acknowledgement. They understand they’re using a new type of technology that hasn’t been used before, and here are the risks as the organization sees them. And so we kind of got our customers online first who were bought in, and then we worked the organization to create a pathway to create those lighthouse stones of innovation and then a risk assessment and adoption and acceptance process. And then went live in a heavily monitored environment where were giving regular updates to our partners in the congressional side regularly. 

Alex Kouts
But the last thing I’ll say on that, and I think this is particularly important with government employees aren’t often the heroes in most Michael Bay movies that you watch. They’re ancillary characters. And I think the brand of government has been tarnished over the past of 50 to 100 years, or maybe it always was in this country, given our kind of endemic distrust of authority figures, which is a big part of what it is to be American. But they’re really hardworking, super patriotic individuals who want to do innovative, great stuff. You just have to remember, and this is true in large enterprises, too, they are not rewarded for it. They’re rewarded for de risking things and ensuring continuity of service, not trying new stuff that makes people’s lives x percent better or the organization perform better. Government in particular is a fortune. One company, it is not going out of business. 

Alex Kouts
A new company, a startup, has to adopt technology in order to survive. Cut costs, access new revenue. Government’s not going anywhere, and if it does, we’re all screwed anyway for a lot of other reasons. And so it’s just a totally different paradigm for sales. You have to understand that culture before you go into it. 

Brett
That’s super fascinating. And are there any other numbers or metrics you can share that just demonstrate the traction and growth that you’re seeing right now? 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, from a contractual perspective, we’re always tight lipped about who our customers are. That’s partially for security sake also. It’s just what we agree to with our customers to protect their kind of identities and things like that. So I can’t give you specifics on individual customers, but I will say over the past several years, we’ve expanded from Congress to state government, from governors to state legislatures, mayors, counties, city councils, AGS, Das, pretty much every level of government, every type of customer you can imagine. We are now currently serving thousands and thousands of staffers and elected representatives every single day as daily active, unique uses the platform that have unbelievable usage. We’re talking like high 90s utilization rate of the platform. Because they live in our tool, every day is required to do their job. We are ingesting billions of data points and messages on a yearly basis across the US so we can help members and representatives understand what their constituents are reaching out about. 

Alex Kouts
And again, as I mentioned before, we’re in 44 or so states serving 200 million Americans. And so that kind of triple digit growth year over year is compounded in a really beautiful way for us. 

Brett
And if you zoom out into the future, will you eventually take this to other countries or is there a big enough market in the US or would you only ever want to focus on the US just due to your mission? 

Alex Kouts
We definitely see a market in other countries. I think the US is a very mature, extremely complex democracy. We have 570,000 elected officials in the US and so it’s a very big market to build a multibillion dollar company and we don’t have to expand outside the US to do that. But we want to. We believe the cause of furthering democracy is not purely an American pursuit, it is a global pursuit. And if you look at the broad based data you have a Pew Research and some of the other large think tanks that have put out data on this. Democracy is in a real difficult state globally. I think the actions of Vladimir Putin with the invasion in Ukraine have pulled a lot of people back over to liberalism and democracy because they brought onto the center stage the costs of autocratic regimes and lack of checks and balances and things like that. 

Alex Kouts
But I think democracy is still very much under threat. So we’ve definitely soft circled some countries that we think makes sense for expansion. We’ve had some countries actually reach out to us based on contacts they’ve had with other customers that are using our software. But at the moment we are bleeding red, white and blue over here. We’ve got a lot of work to do here before we expand. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. I’d love to talk a bit more about your efforts in terms of category creation. So what’s the name of the category? Is it constituent relationship management or how do you define the name of the category? 

Alex Kouts
Yeah, for us it’s broader. We talk about it as that we are building an operating system for representative democracy. If you look at democracy in and of itself, it is a service delivery and communication based government. An autocratic regime is not right in China. If you got a problem with the FDA, maybe there’s a health email you can send a message to, but it does not come with the expectation that you are going to get a meaningful response or change as a result of any of those things, no matter how many people reach out. And so in the US. It is starkly different. Difference bureaucrats elected representatives, lifelong government employees are enormously responsive to public sentiment. It is the god that they worship. And if anybody listening has watched too much Deep or House of Cards or whatever show you’ve watched on politics and you believe anything other than that, you are sorely mistaken. 

Alex Kouts
And the media has manipulated an incorrect understanding of what democracy actually is. These people go to sleep every day and wake up every day terrified about a scandal or constituents being angry about this thing or that thing that affects public perception of them, which is how the system is designed to work. And so the constituent communication aspect of it and service delivery is a huge part of it. To put a ball on that part of it, really smart elected representatives will tell me, and I’ve heard this a thousand times in a thousand different ways, that you get in office through politics, but you stay in through constituent service. But that’s not just true of elected, that’s true of government agencies and municipal offices and all kinds of things. So that’s a very big market. But when we talk about the reason we say operating system for representative democracy is it’s not just about communication. 

Alex Kouts
It’s about all the things that happen up and downstream from that communication, which makes that market deceptively large. And there’s a million ways to expand that. So it starts with communication and expands to everything that’s required to get that communication out and resolve those issues fully with the people that reach in. 

Brett
And every founder listening and every founder that I interview has aspirations to create a category. I think that’s the cool thing to do now in tech and everyone wants to pursue it, but it’s really hard. And I think you touched on that in the earlier part of the interview where you mentioned some of the investors pushing back a little bit on that. So can you talk us through what some of those early conversations were like with investors when you were talking about your aspirations of creating a category? 

Alex Kouts
Sure. So I don’t think that investors would talk about it with that parlance right. Or at least the objections wouldn’t come and like, well, I don’t think you can create a category. They typically come with concerns about the tam or an unvalidated tam because they haven’t seen 55 other companies do exactly what you’re trying to do to believe that the market is there. And so if I have to explain to someone, hey, how many elected representatives do you think there are in the US. Alaska investor? I don’t know, 20? No, it’s almost 20 times that. Right, it’s almost 600,000, almost 30 times that. So it’s an enormous number of elected representatives. Okay, great. But I still don’t understand enough okay, great. But let’s take the state of New Jersey. Like what’s the government look like in the state of New Jersey between all the municipalities and cities and this and that. 

Alex Kouts
And you have to kind of walk through every single step of it with folks to help them understand it. But the problem is that is very expensive in a fundraising conversation. And so my strong recommendation is come up with metaphors that can help drive home the value proposition for someone who doesn’t care about your mission and isn’t interested in it, isn’t going to sit down and do the time. I think we have a lot of funds say no to us, not because they didn’t believe in our attraction or the business per se, but because they didn’t have the time or resources to invest in understanding the market. And we’ve had some of those funds come back around later as we continue to sell. But what that objection typically looks like is, all right, well, we’d love to see you break into a couple of these markets and validate it and then come back to us. 

Alex Kouts
And then at that point, we’d love to take a look, right? And so we do that and we come back and they’re still like, well, we’d love to see you expand more into these markets. Beyond that, come back to us. After that. We do that, they come back again like, well, we’d love to see a little bit different types of maybe revenue expansion or this or that with these specific types of customers. In reality, as a founder, you have to say that’s actually not them having a problem with the space. That’s a lack of conviction about investing in a new market they don’t understand. Stop wasting your time with them. I think the goal is to look for people who thematically and from a mission perspective, understand what you’re trying to accomplish and then double click on them, invest in them, work through their networks to find more people like them and expand and consult over time. 

Alex Kouts
It is not unusual for a category defining company to, as opposed to going the institutional route, which may better for really heavily over indexed spaces, doing a syndicate of high net worth individuals who believe at the beginning and then later doing the institutional realm afterwards, which is a nontraditional way of going. I’ve had companies of mine that were lead investors like Sequoia and Canaan and a lot of big blue chip venture funds that I have a lot of respect for. They may not be the best place to go to define a new category unless you have a partner there that really religiously believes in it. So I would also say look for intellectual capital that’s been produced or articles written by venture funds about your space or anything that is closely related to it. That tends to be a really good spot. And you mentioned Lux Capital before. 

Alex Kouts
That guy is writing it. He’s been in the press all over the course of this week in the past several weeks. He’s putting out a lot of intellectual capital, right? But he’s not the only one that’s done that. There’s a lot of other funds that have done that kind of thing. Look to them, the last thing on the category definition, I’d say, is the market and the customer speaks volumes about you. And so one of the reasons Bradley invested Indigov was he knew a lot of elected representatives during the diligence process and said, all right, well, I want you to pitch this to all my buddies for elected representatives. And everybody that he put us in touch with bought the product in the diligence process for a Series A. And so I’ve never actually gotten customers from a diligence process. That was pretty amazing. And so that made me think that was super useful. 

Alex Kouts
And one other point. There are different types of venture funds. I think a founder really has to understand the taxonomy of venture funds that are out there. There are the large 10, 20, 30 plus billion dollar multistage funds. There are the smaller kind of follow on funds that have to syndicate deals. There are the early stage. When I say early stage, I mean they’re on their first or second fund or something like that. Really early venture capital funds where they really have to grind it out because they have to build their network so they can get deal flow. And so the earlier, like, first and second fund cycle funds actually can be really useful for you filling out around because they have a ton of friends. And so maybe don’t go directly to Sequoias, Andree Sims and everybody else in the world. Go to a smaller 100 or a couple of hundred million dollar fund, get them on board, and then have them set up meetings for you with validated friends. 

Alex Kouts
They have other funds and things like that. So think really hard about your angle of approach. You have to when you’re building a category, much more so again than over indexed sectors. 

Brett
That’s super useful tactical advice that I’m sure the listeners will appreciate. I know we are almost up on time, so I’ll wrap with one final question here. Let’s zoom out into the future. Let’s say five years from now. What does the company look like? 

Alex Kouts
So we have a bold vision. Like if you’re an estimate banker, you get a Bloomberg terminal, right? And I know there’s some competition there now, but that’s really what the mainstay has been for a long time. We want to be that for elected representatives. The moment you get elected, indicov is the tool that you need in order to do your job. And it comes with a lot of things that not only help you better at constituent communication, but a variety of other things that are kind of tangential to that. And so we see a significant amount of expansion potential in the future. From a feature density perspective. I’m a feature guy, I’m a designer, I’m a product guy, so I think a lot about that. But ultimately, the measure of the company as to whether or not we are successful is if we meaningfully affect the user experience of democracy, the functioning of our government in a positive way that we can look at and say, we did that. 

Alex Kouts
That’s how we know we will won. It’s not liquidity events, it’s not footprint, it’s not revenue numbers. All those things to me, are means to an end proxies to get us to where we need to go. The answer is, do we help this country, do we help our democracy operate better to scale more effectively? Amazing, Alex. 

Brett
We’re going to have to wrap, but before we do, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go? Yeah, just go. 

Alex Kouts
Adding to Gov, you can follow us in any platform. Definitely reach out to us on LinkedIn. We’re always hiring, looking for really good folks. If you’re an elected representative and you listen to this podcast and you want to take things to the next level and learn what other electives across the country are doing, we always love to have a conversation with you. So, Brett, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the questions. This is my favorite stuff to talk about, so really enjoyed it. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem at all. Let’s keep in touch and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision. 

Alex Kouts
Thanks, Brett. Cheers.